Freeing their employees from boring, repetitive and low-skilled tasks is the dream of many marketers. Because despite the supplier’s commitment to seamless integration and data flow, manual data processing is an inevitable result when implementing new digital tools and processes.
However, these results are not limited to marketing, there are similar stories in finance, IT, human resources, and other important business functions.
It was the pain felt by professionals with these functions that first led to the emergence of a set of tools that came to be known as Robotic Process Automation, or RPA (not to be confused with the reality show related to the Royal Prince) Alfred Hospital ).
Forrester principal analyst Leslie Joseph describes RPA at its most basic level as the ability to use software robots to understand user interface elements on websites and applications, string these elements into a workflow, and effectively imitate the behavior of human operators . Therefore, RPA robots are often referred to as digital workers.
“For RPA, the typical low-hanging fruit is any type of repetitive task that humans must complete,” Joseph said Chief Marketing Officer“Things like moving data from “location a” to “location b” or creating a case from a Salesforce ticket. In this sense, it is a very versatile tool because it is UI-centric Screen capture.”
This versatility means that RPA can be used in a large number of applications. Joseph said that the most effective and obvious starting point is the back-end financial or procurement process, where the application set itself is a legacy.
“From a CFO’s point of view, it makes sense for’digital workers’ to enter and access these types of workflows, otherwise they will have to modernize the system, which will separate capital expenditure from other things they need to do Take it away urgently,” he said.
However, although RPA-based digital workers may now be common in financial and IT workflows, Joseph said that so far, they have had very little application in marketing, mainly because most modern marketing platforms contain powerful The integrated function of API, thereby minimizing the demand process based on RPA. However, several recent announcements indicate an increase in the use of RPA in marketing.
RPA and marketing use cases
In August, Salesforce announced that it had acquired Servicetrace, a German RPA company, to integrate the existing API-based integration capabilities it acquired when it acquired MuleSoft in 2018. In the same month, another provider, MoEngage, raised US$32.5 million to help develop RPA technology to optimize customer engagement.
These events are just the latest in a series of financing, mergers and acquisitions by RPA providers, including multiple acquisitions by Microsoft, SAP, IBM and ServiceNow, as well as the public listing of RPA expert UiPath. The value of the latter has now risen to more than 35 billion U.S. dollars.
With so much money, it is only a matter of time before marketers’ problems start to interest RPA providers, especially those related to the data flow in customer engagement.
Jennie Subratha, head of A/NZ marketing at RPA company Blue Prism, said: “We are definitely seeing opportunities for any company with an online community where users can share information to solve problems. Digital workers can improve the user experience and Minimize the workload.” Marketing team. ”
Blue Prism itself uses digital workers to perform community management tasks.
“When the Blue Prism community is inactive for six weeks, our digital worker Albert puts it in the dormant queue and sends an email to the community manager to prompt them to post,” Subratha explained. “If there is no response for another two weeks, Albert will close the community and merge the content.
“We also explored the use of digital workers for keyword directories, which helps identify when threads appear in the wrong community and move them accordingly. It can also help eradicate spam from the system.”
Joseph also saw the powerful application of RPA in customer management. He spliced data from systems together, otherwise these systems would not be easy to integrate.
“If I want to connect customer journeys to different data sets that provide customer churn or similar information, there is no easy way to do this using integration between applications,” Joseph said. “This is usually where RPA proves to be really effective.”
He also saw the potential of RPA in improving the efficiency of marketing expenditures.
“If you are thinking about simplifying processes related to digital advertising, you can actually consider using digital labor and applying it to these situations, so it is not humans that sit down and spend hours creating these optimizations or running these workflows,” Joseph said . “It’s still easier to put an RPA robot in it and let it run a whole set of processes and data and generate output.”
The third possibility of introducing RPA lies in lead automation.
“Many of them are suitable for RPA because it is located in an area where you have applications that can do some of these things in an automated way, but you still need to move external data from place a to place b, or you need to be from email or other Qualitative information about the place,” Joseph said. “So RPA is a great tool to move and merge data mechanically.”
Finally, another marketing task that is very suitable for RPA is to provide information to chatbots. “The chatbots on the website will usually provide you with information,” Joseph said.
“But what if the chatbot actually gets information from the customer and then passes it to the downstream RPA bot, which can do certain things on behalf of the customer, such as solving a work order or creating a work order?”
The evolution of RPA
The rapid development of RPA technology is due in part to advances in machine learning, which has expanded the complexity of tasks that digital workers can undertake. For example, UiPath and Alteryx have jointly created a codeless data manipulation tool that can use complex data from different systems and apply machine learning techniques before passing it to RPA robots. Joseph said this led to the emergence of a concept called intelligent automation.
“RPA bots can now embed ML components that can view email interactions or scan documents and extract unstructured information and convert it into structured data, which can then be used downstream for customer sentiment or potential customer intent,” he said .
RPA also coexists with the many different options that the market can use to integrate systems and data. In addition to the local integration features in martech tools, the supplier ServiceNow also provides a cloud-based platform that enables users to replace unstructured work patterns with smart and automated workflows. There are also many integrated platform as a service (IPaaS) providers, including Boomi and Jitterbit, which provide alternative methods for creating and managing digital workflows.
“In the past few years, there has been this convergence between RPA and IPaaS,” Joseph said. “Over time, all these different automation opportunities and technologies are converging into an automated’grid’ between the applications and the people who use them. This is where all the work processes and all the intelligence is happening now.”
However, although RPA has great opportunities in marketing, Joseph said that marketers usually have enough opportunities to simply use the tools they already have. At the same time, most RPA providers have not promoted contact with CMOs too much, because there are already such important opportunities in providing services to other business functions.
However, the success of RPA also means that many easy opportunities in finance, IT, and other fields have been met.
“We have reached the point where the major organizations that started RPA and process automation three or four years ago have reached the point where their most basic processes have been automated,” Joseph said. “Now they are thinking about the next group, and because of its complexity, the next group of processes to automate is always more than just the back-end processes. They are usually processes that touch the front end and the customer experience in some way.”
Although RPA tools eventually led to the creation of digital workers, their creation and integration still require a lot of skills, Joseph said, this may provide another obstacle to the introduction of RPA into marketing in the short term.
“In terms of marketing skills, investing in learning this technology and finding a logical place to apply RPA is traditionally not good,” Joseph said. “But going back to the fact that this tool is so versatile, assuming marketers have this skill in their organization, they can do a lot of interesting things.
“For those interested in creating non-standard ways to view analysis or optimize certain workflows that are still quite manual, RPA is a very interesting technology.”
Don’t miss the rich insights and content provided by CMO A/NZ, and sign up for our weekly CMO Digest newsletter and information service here.
You can also follow the CMO on Twitter: @CMO Australia, Participate in the CMO conversation on LinkedIn: Chief Marketing Officer ANZ Bank, Follow us for regular updates Via CMO Australia’s Linkedin company page
.
#marketers #robotic #process #automation
More from Source